Slide Tips: Worth Ten Thousand Words (Rick Altman)

This post by Rick Altman is the fourth in our recently launched Slide Tips series.
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Sometimes, photos can tell too much

Those of us who came to the presentation community from graphics keep time by the evolution of digital photography. 1995…Kodak introduced the first digital camera in America, an $800 shoebox with 1MP of resolution. 2000…the first time I took a picture of a broken appliance and triumphantly entered Home Depot with my 2MP Olympus and its tiny LCD screen to say “Here, I need to replace this.” 2005…the first time my wife deleted an entire folder of photos and proclaimed she would never buy another digital camera.

These are not unique experiences. In fact, just the opposite – few industries have had such a profound impact on another as digital photography has had on presentations. We all remember our first PowerPoint experience, years before presenters knew how to import photos to their slides. For most of us, it was quite painful.

Therefore, you would think that I would be hailing the integration of photos to slides as a glorious development. Finally, relief from the endless and mind-numbing procession of boring bullet slides!

Well, not so fast.

There is no doubt that modern slide content is more colorful than that of a decade ago, and capable designers have woven incredible visuals into their messages today. However, it is now so easy to bring a photo to a slide, everyone is doing it, often with little regard for the photo’s appropriateness or suitability.

I find myself wishing on occasion that more people would take literally the advice of Bert Decker and just use black slides.

But that is not going to happen, what with every member of western civilization being a potential content creator with his or her digital camera, and more online stock photo libraries available than any one person could ever visit in a lifetime. And I wouldn’t want it to happen – I like photos. I love using meaningful photos in my slides, which in turn brings meaning to my message.

Here are three common issues that face unsuspecting slide designers when they leap into photo integration before they look.

1. Misuse of Contrast

If you were to poll a dozen professional photographers about the qualities of a good photo, it is likely that all of them would include contrast in their lists. Contrast creates energy, vitality, drama, tension and all of those other high-impact nouns that most of us don’t understand, while we nod knowingly anyway.

So it is no surprise that most presentation designers are drawn to photos with good contrast, like the one shown in Slide 1. This modern building taken from a cool angle has a nice edge to it, and it has lots of contrast. It would be a fine photo to integrate into a business-oriented message.

The first impulse of many (and it’s not an altogether bad impulse) is to size up the photo to cover the entire slide and use it as a background. Unfortunately, now the very quality that drew you to the photo will prove hazardous to your career, as the photo completely obscures the text in front of it, as Slide 2 shows. There is too much contrast.

There are all sorts of tricks you could apply to the text to improve its readability, like using a drop shadow or boxing it out, but the fact remains: this photo is too strong to serve as the background. Background images are not supposed to compete with foreground objects; when they do, they punish your audience for paying attention. That’s not good.

You don’t need to throw this photo away – you just need to make it sink into the background more. This is easily accomplished, across any modern version of PowerPoint, with a semi-transparent rectangle, drawn atop the entire photo. Fill it with black or navy, and set its transparency to about 25% to produce the look shown in Slide 3. The feel of the photo remains, but the contrast that destroyed readability has been removed. The tones and the contours are much more even.

There are other ways to accomplish this simple effect (Version 2007 can tint a photo as if it were your image-editing software), but the transparent rectangle is easy, flexible, and works with all versions of the software since XP. With it, you can experiment with layouts like the one in Slide 4, where you cover just a portion of the photo. You might then still face the problem of the photo being too prominent, but it’s worth exploring.

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2. Too Specific

The typical dilemma goes something like this. You are creating a set of slides for, say, a life insurance company. You want to project serenity, security, peace of mind, and all of those other qualities that exist together only in the world of advertising.

Slide 1 exudes many of those qualities. Plus, it is well-composed and has good color. And that is precisely its problem: it is too literal. Your audience might wonder who this couple is and if they are supposed to know or recognize the couple. Even if they understand that the photo represents an abstract notion, there is an inherent disconnect because the photo has such strong features. How ironic that this photo would work better if it were a bit muddled.

And that is your task – to muddle this photo, using the Muddle tools that every good image editor has. Slide 2 shows the result of a two-minute venture with Corel PhotoPaint’s Crayon effect. Adobe Photoshop can produce a similar effect with its Rough Pastel and Spatter effects. Removing the sharpness of the photo does nothing to change its evocative quality – it is still clearly a couple enjoying a moment of serenity. But now your audience won’t spend even a second studying the minutiae of it. To integrate the text we used the same transparent rectangle technique, with one twist: The transparency is defined gradually across the black rectangle, from 100% on the left side to just 20% on the right.

Often less is more. Less detail provides more powerful imagery. Let your audience members use their own imagination to tell some of the story.

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3. Too Much Focus

We thought it was the perfect photo. In the Editor’s Picks section at photos.com, we found a photo of a man in a hospital room with a caregiver behind him. It was ideal for a slide deck extolling the virtues of the Patient’s Bill of Rights.

Or so we thought.

We knew we might have a contrast issue (and of course, we knew we could solve that—see above), but what we really encountered was a sharpness issue. The photo we chose was perfectly exposed and optimally composed – too much so! The background, including the caregiver, was just too prominent, too sharp, too in-focus. Slide 1 shows the issue all too well, as once again the background takes too much attention away from the text and the patient in the foreground.

Most stock photo houses do not have a section entitled “Poorly Composed” or “Out-Of Focus” — the responsibility of mucking up a perfectly fine shot is yours entirely. Glibness aside, there are many legitimate reasons to add blur to a background, the two chief ones being to bring foreground elements into more prominence and to create a bit of drama. Photography 1A: photos with a long focal length (i.e. much of the photo is in focus) are descriptive; photos with a shallow focal length are dramatic.

With the help of image-editing software like Adobe Photoshop, or Corel’s PhotoPaint or Paint Shop Pro, it’s not terribly difficult to separate the patient and his pillow into a separate layer or object, floating above the background. Once done, you can apply a blur to the background, but not the object. That produces a photo that is much more effective. As Slide 2 shows, now the patient is center-stage, even from his perch on the left edge of the slide, and the text is much more readable against a blurred background.

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If you are like most readers and contributors here at SlideShare, you have good ideas to circulate and you have good instincts about the visuals that could contribute to your delivery. Rarely is the case that you find the perfect photo online or take the perfect photo yourself. But with a bit of know-how and creative thinking, you can usually create the perfect scene in which to tell your story.